What did I expect?
To leave a haemorrhage
of violets wherever I walked?
No. A lost son is called prodigal.
A lost daughter is just called lost.

She should've stood out in a crowd
She should've made her mother proud
She should've fallen on her stance
She should've had another chance

She should have been a son
She should have been a son
She should have been a son
She should have been a son

'You're a heap of flesh and guts and blood in a wax museum. The only thing real. Sickeningly real. Crimson and warm where the others are pale and cold. Revoltingly red,
nauseatingly alive. You're a child in a graveyard.

when i die i want my corpse to be unrecognizable. a something-or-other dead on the side of the road, half-eaten, half-crushed, all-forgotten

i am no hector of troy.
the gods of Olympus won't keep my corpse clean until my father comes pleading.
my gods are the earthworms writhing beneath me and gift-giver Gaia, who strips my bones of their flesh and whispers softly as she feeds me to her children "lie still, lie still, lie still"

/a k/
noun
1. heavy wind, cold rain, & yes the stars, & yes these hands of mine. a dream in my chest is melting. my dream sheds its muddy, thunder-stained skin & asks for a heart of peony fields this time.
2. & the nights get heavy like they always do. i am older which means when i think of forests i get stuck not on the robin eggs but on the fox teeth. in my head I am hunting for myself, but I come up empty again. the night grows so wide it could be a cavern & i am somewhere underneath it, inside it, lost. but travellers always leave lanterns behind & as i feel for the candle there arrives a memory of bronze-coloured light.
3. so i dream, i dream, i keep dreaming. one word in my mouth crystallizes like sugar: hope.

Hope is not a delicate bird.
It doesn’t have colourful feathers or comes.
When you need it most
Hope is a starving rat
An ugly thing
With broken glass claws and yellow pointed teeth
That carries diseases like rebellion, revolution and change
Were ever its tail flicks they drop
It snorts pesticides like coke
It survives in our world
Able to find a way to live were nothing else can.

I had a broken tooth and you had a broken car that sang at certain speeds.
I was holding my crimson soaked mouth, we were all laughing.
You, the only one who was worried.
Speeding to the doctor with your hands at ten and two,
sending me the occasional look, asking if it hurts,
does it hurt.
-All the memories of you do